


Secret and Quiet and Bright

by gnomesb4trolls



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Aslan jerked those kids around and its not ok, Gen, Susan Pevensie Never Forgot, The Last Battle but no train crash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-23 18:22:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18707458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnomesb4trolls/pseuds/gnomesb4trolls
Summary: While her siblings are in Narnia fighting the last battle, Susan remembers, and waits for them to come home.





	Secret and Quiet and Bright

On the first night of the third month since her siblings left for Narnia for the last time, Susan dreams that Cair Paravel is burning. 

In the dream there’s snow on the ground, the drifts high enough to change the shape of the land, making it unrecognizable. She’s in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, brown, not white, because she’s never gotten over checking for this particular detail. Edmund is sitting next to her, older than he was when they first came to Narnia but younger than he is now (she thinks. Their ages are always blurred in dreams, the same as they sometimes are in the waking world: she can never look at any of them without seeing the faint outline of the person they were, an afterimage from another life). She’s holding his hand under a pile of furs, tears streaming down her face as she watches their palace grow smaller, until it’s just a blur of blue and yellow flames in the distance. She wakes up with real tears on her face, soaking into her pillow. 

She’s dreamed of Narnia before, but this time the dream feels true in a way that none of the other ones did. She gets out of bed, shivering, wraps herself in her dressing gown. Outside her window, the sun is just beginning to rise, staining the sky pink above the drab London roofs, but all she can see is flames against snow. 

She does the only thing she knows to do: she goes back to where it all started. 

There’s one good thing about her siblings having been missing for over two months now: no one questions her when she needs to take a day off. She knows that her parents and her coworkers think that she’s in shock, that she’s so calm about their sudden disappearance and the utter lack of clues because she doesn’t know how else to cope. That might be a little bit true, but she also knows the strangeness of Narnian time, how it catches you in its net and then spits you out in a different place from where you started, or the same place, or any place but the one you expect. Time has felt like something she keeps an uneasy truce with at best, ever since the four of them stumbled back out of the wardrobe. She knows that her siblings could be anywhere, that they could reappear at any moment. 

Until the dream, she had felt almost sure, as sure as she could feel, that she would know if something was wrong. Now, there’s a fist in her gut, a sensation that she remembers from old wars. Something is wrong there. Something is wrong, and even though she chose not to go, she has to do her best to find out if she can. 

It’s a fool’s errand, and she’s even surer of this when she finally reaches the sleepy country station, painfully small now to her older eyes: the Professor’s house is long gone, and even if the wardrobe was still there, its magic intact, she doesn’t know what she would do. She had her own reasons for staying, and not least among them was the hope that she could act as an anchor in this world, a reason for them to come back. She would go anywhere for them if she could be sure of getting back in the end, but she won’t risk losing herself again. 

Still, she walks out of the station into the brooding spring day, clouds threatening a thunderstorm, their shadows huge on the gentle hills. It’s miles to the place where the professor’s house used to be, but she doesn’t care. As long as she’s walking, concentrating on feeling the ground under her feet, it’s easy not to think about who she was when she last travelled this road. 

When she reaches the spot where the house stood, though, everything changes. She wasn’t sure if she would recognize it, but she knows before she even looks up: it’s a weight in her stomach, a tightness in her shoulders. Now, the images flood back: holding Lucy’s hand in the car on the way here from the station, feeling small even though she was trying so hard to be bigger for her sister, trying to substitute for the mother they’d left behind. It had been warmer here than in London, and she’d started to sweat inside her wool cardigan, but she hadn’t wanted to take it off because it still smelled like home, because a part of her didn’t want to admit that they had to go to sleep in this strange place with too much sky and too many unfamiliar noises. 

That’s the part that makes her eyes prickle: remembering what a city child she was, frightened by the strange quiet of the country. That girl had turned into someone else while she wasn’t watching, someone who couldn’t sleep when they went back to London because of the constant whir of engines. For months she’d lain awake in the harsh city light, waiting for her body to forget the particular quality of the Narnian dark. It never had, even when she’d learned how to sleep again. 

She stands on the spot where they’d first climbed out of the car to look at their temporary home, a huddle of drab, frightened kids clinging to each other’s hands (except for Edmund, who’d stood a little apart, scowling, not letting himself need them even then). Something had caught in child-Susan’s chest as she’d thought about London: what if it wasn’t there when they got back? 

London had endured, though, still recognizable despite the piles of rubble that had greeted them on their return; it was Narnia that had crumbled while they were gone. No, that wasn’t quite right: Narnia itself had still been there, but their Narnia had disappeared, everything that the four of them had built together. She’s never forgotten how they’d looked as they’d stood in the ruins of Cair Paravel: Peter’s fists clenched, Edmund with that terrible blankness on his face that meant he’d gone deep inside himself, Lucy touching one of the tumbled stones with tears in her eyes, as if she could call it back to life. Susan, for her part, had felt too old and too young all at once, knowing that she’d lived to see her life’s work fall to pieces, and that she still had to try to put it right. 

Now, on this spring day a world away from that moment, she closes her eyes and tries to feel where the wardrobe was. She knows that it’s no use: that door hasn’t led anywhere for years, for centuries. She’s not sure she even believes that it was ever the door itself that mattered: maybe they were the door. That’s what it had felt like when Caspian called them with the horn, as if something inside her was opening up, flung wide to let Narnia in. 

She opens her eyes and tries to see only what’s there: a slight rise in the grass with a few oddly shaped lumps, unrecognizable as anything but empty space unless you already know that there used to be a house there. Ploughed fields stretch in every direction, the smell of earth tugging at old memories of spring planting in Narnia. Maybe the space where the house was is also waiting its turn for the plough; maybe it’s better that way. Edmund would like that, she thinks: he understood better than any of them that preserving the past comes with a cost. When she thinks of her brother in Narnia, she sees him crumbling a clod of earth between his fingers, sitting up long nights in the Cair Paravel library studying almanacs. Narnia’s farmers had come to him for justice, but also because he had made it his business to understand how to make things grow. 

There are tears on her face now, and she breathes through the tightness in her throat. Until now, she hasn’t let herself doubt that they’ll come back. She hasn’t let herself grieve for what could have been, for the girl that she was before Narnia and the queen she became there. She’s been trying for so long to push herself in one direction or the other, to plant her feet in one world, but maybe this is just where she lives now, in this blank space. How will she know how to do it, though, without Peter and Edmund and Lucy? 

She turns away for the last time, raising the house again in her mind: the terrifying bulk of it that she first saw as a frightened child, the thrilling mystery that it became, the afterthought once it had done its work and opened the door for them. When they had first come back out of the wardrobe, it had seemed so much smaller that she kept bumping into walls, confused by the size of the rooms, the childlike clumsiness of her own body. 

As she trudges the long road back to the train station, her body aching as though she’s fought yet another battle, she thinks that she might be a little glad that it’s gone. 

 

She’s sitting by the window in her tiny flat, watching the sun sink behind drab London rooftops, trying to think of nothing but the pale clear color of the sky. She isn’t sure if she was right to go back: the place inside her that was holding onto hope feels numb now, but she still reaches for them, her mind straining towards the place where she used to be able to feel Narnia waiting for her. Please come back. 

There’s a sound behind her and she starts, turning. It’s coming from her tiny bedroom closet, and for a second she’s frozen, not sure if she wants to laugh or cry. It can’t be.  
She crosses the room at last, turns the rickety knob. They stumble out in a tangle of limbs, smelling like battle, in Narnian clothes streaked with dirt and sweat, years older than when they left. Her breath catches on a sob. 

“You came back.”


End file.
